Jilytober 2021 prompt: Having a bad day (and one final thing causes them to break).

when you're young, you just run

clear blue water / high tide came and brought you in
and i could go on and on, on and on, and I will
skies grew darker / currents swept you out again
and you were just gone and gone, gone and gone

Done.

Maybe when she opened her eyes it will all have been a dream.

Done.

Maybe the snot dried around her nose was just a cold, her puffy eyes just fitful sleep.

Done.

Maybe she could stay here, pretending behind in her curtained four-poster, just a little bit longer.

Done.

"Lil?" Mary knocked gently on the poster of her bed. "Lil, it's breakfast—you're going to be late if you don't get up."

Maybe she should just call it a day and skive off—she didn't do it often, and if anything justified it, this did.

"Lily, please—are okay? Are you ill?"

Driven by a need to assuage her friend's panicked voice, Lily pushed herself up to sit against her pillows and scrounged around her sheets for her wand to unlock the sticking charm she'd cast the night before.

"Oh, Lil," Mary gasped, sinking onto the edge of Lily's bed and taking her hand. "What's wrong, what's happened?"

Fresh tears surged to the surface as all the memories of the night before—not a dream, but very much real—flooded back. "Mare," she choked, "I—I fucked up, and now he's—he said he's done."

Mary's brows furrowed together, her dark eyes flitting between Lily's, and she braced herself for the question she knew was coming.

The quiet calm of Mary's voice—not angry, just wanting to understand—somehow made it worse to hear. "Who?"

She had to confess, she knew she did, and yet the words dropped like weights in her stomach, clawing and fighting their whole fall to the bottom. With a last, shuddering breath, she answered thickly, "J-James."

Mary's eyes widened as her mouth hung shamelessly, but none of the responses Lily would have predicted—maybe laughing, maybe scolding—came. Instead, Mary immediately snuggled under the blankets at Lily's side, wrapping a protective arm around her shoulders, and said gently, "Tell me everything."

Lily wasn't at breakfast.

In the same pang of pain, that knowledge left him with a twisted sense of satisfaction. He could only hope she was stewing over what happened the night before—and feeling guilty.

"Prongs?" Sirius looked at him curiously over his glass of orange juice. "You in there?"

James stabbed at a potato with his fork in answer. He needed to stoke the anger, keep it alive, because without it, he might not be able to be upright at all.

"James." It was Remus this time, trying with a quieter attention.

He definitely couldn't have that.

"What d'you guys think about a prank tonight?" he asked. Sirius and Remus exchanged a look James didn't want to think about. "I still have those old Filibuster's in my trunk. Filch's office?"

Peter's face lit up—"I forgot about those!"—right as Remus frowned and reminded, "You're Head Boy."

"And?" James challenged. "Doesn't mean things have to change. Still the same old me, aren't I?"

He held Remus's gaze across the table, watching the worry work across his friend's face. "I suppose…what's brought this on, anyway?"

James shrugged, turning back to his plate. He could feel Sirius's eyes on him, burning into his head, but he refused to look up and instead occupied his restless mind with smashing his potato under his fork.

Sirius sighed, an exasperated sound, before he drawled, "Are you going to fucking eat or just smash your food like a grumpy child until you tell us what's bothering you?"

His body stiffened, stomach churning at the thought of putting even a morsel of what was on his plate in his mouth, and he pushed up from the table, clambering over the bench without meeting anyone's eyes as he mumbled, "Just not hungry," and fled like a coward.

"It started on the train," Lily admitted heavily.

Mary yelped. "On the train?"

Lily couldn't help a small giggle. "Yeah. We'd started writing in the summer, after we got our letters, and it was kinda…flirty, I guess."

"So…you got on the train, and…"

Lily shrugged. "We met up in the Heads' carriage, and he helped me put my trunk up on the rack, and we were just so…close all of a sudden, and we—we kissed."

It was a rather lame description for the moment itself, one that had been simmering with the anticipation of continuing their flirtatious banter in person and a tension crackling between them as they saw each other for the first time in months. Within moments of his nearness, the invasion of his smell in her nose and the new tautness to the fit of his shirt and the added height to his frame had all swirled together in a heady mix stronger than any Firewhisky, and when he'd bent down halfway, she'd pushed up the rest, meeting him without a thought. It had been relatively chaste, just a lingering press of lips with his hand cupping her elbow and her palms pressed against his chest, before the lurch of the train had jolted them back to reality and the fact that they were now late for their own Prefects' meeting.

"And then?" Mary prompted.

"And then it sort of just…" She swallowed thickly. "Kept happening?"

Getting into the rhythm of being Head students had necessitated a decent amount of time alone together, figuring out how to do the various reports and monitor schedules and whatnot, and then devising systems to get it all done efficiently between them. And as they'd spent their days around each other in class, her eyes constantly getting caught on rolled shirtsleeves and his hand ruffling his hair, they'd started spending time around in each other in evenings for decidedly non-work purposes.

It might have not gone that way, but she'd let it. One night after writing the next batch of patrol schedules, they'd packed their bags and started the trek back to Gryffindor Tower when, just before the turn to the corridor holding the Fat Lady, James had grabbed her arm and said, "Wait."

She'd turned, all of her awareness heightened, zeroed in on him, and he'd stepped into her space, sliding his hands around her waist and to her back. Her heart had been a drum in her chest, her legs, her ears, as her hormones surged for him, wanting his skin, his muscles, his hair, his lips—

His nose had nudged alongside hers, his breath hot on her mouth as he whispered, "I can't stop thinking about kissing you," and, unable to fight the wave of attraction—of arousal—that had swept through her, she'd kissed him again, messily, hungrily, dropping her bag at her feet and slipping her fingers through that hair until her back hit stone and his erection ground into her hip.

Reality had caught up to her quickly after that, and when they'd broken apart, panting, she'd gasped, "It's late—"

"Yeah," he'd agreed breathlessly, and he'd pulled further away from her, though the glassiness to his eyes and the swell of his lips had made her clench her thighs together and second-guess her decision to think with her rational mind.

But she'd forced herself to pick up her bag, sling it across her body, and take a couple steps toward their destination—only he hadn't followed. Turning over her shoulder, she'd asked, "Coming?"

He'd ducked his head, chuckling where he was still standing with one hand pressed against the wall, the other at his hip, and mumbled, "In a manner of speaking."

At her blank stare, he'd only nodded his head in the other direction of the corridor and elaborated, "I, um—I'm gonna go take care of this. I'll see you tomorrow?"

The way he'd said it—plainly, unabashedly—had made her heart flip and stomach drop, and though she'd managed a sly smile and a calm-sounding, "Me too—goodnight, James," the reality was that the look on his face as he registered her words only made her whole body flutter with desire, and though she'd taken controlled steps back to the common room, as soon as she'd made it upstairs, she'd flopped onto her bed, charmed the curtains shut and silenced, and thought about James getting himself off elsewhere in the castle as she'd gotten herself atop her sheets.

She left that last bit out in her recitation to Mary, only saying, "And then we just started…hooking up."

Mary stroked her hair gently. "How far did you go?"

Lily shook her head against Mary's shoulder. "Just hand stuff," she told her. "But…it was good, Mare. Incredible. He just made me feel…"

"Made you feel what?" Mary prompted softly after her pause.

She thought back to the flurry of stolen moments that had followed that second kiss, to the way they'd given up pretenses the next time they'd been alone together in the privacy of their study and rushed straight into kissing—hot, fast, like oxygen came from the other's mouth and not the air—and then touching—nervously, clumsily, but also urgently—until he spilled quickly over her hand and she lost herself against his fingers.

"Alive," she answered with a delirious giggle. "So fucking alive."

"So…" Mary spoke slowly, like she was debating her next words. "What exactly…happened?"

Lily's throat closed, shame rising in her chest like bile.

"Oi!" Sirius's hand grabbed him gruffly by the neck and yanked him sideways into a closet off the Entrance Hall.

James shot a glare at him as he shoved Sirius off and then started rubbing where Sirius had grabbed him. "What the fuck, Pads?"

Sirius lit the cramped closet with his wand, crossed his arms, and leaned lazily against the wall, fixing James with a look that dared him to try leaving. Yet when he spoke, his voice was calmer, gentler, than it had been in the Great Hall. "You tell me, Prongs. I know something's happened, you're not yourself this morning, at all. So tell me? Please?"

He stalled, scuffing his shoe on the stone floor, but Sirius was undeterred. "I don't care about missing class," he drawled casually, "so if you want to wait out the whole day in silence, fine by me."

James rolled his eyes. "We shouldn't skip, McGonagall will be livid with me."

Sirius arched a sardonic brow. "Oho, look who's trying to be all Head Boy now—"

"Sirius—"

"Just tell me—"

"I don't want to talk about it—"

"Too bad, your mood's affecting all of us—"

"I'm dealing with it!"

"Like hell you are."

"You don't even know what you're talking about—"

"So spit it the fuck out!"

"WE BROKE UP!" James roared, the words flinging themselves from his mouth like they were desperate to be released into the world, but Sirius's look of complete bewilderment reminded him that they weren't actually…accurate. "Well, we—we weren't exactly together, but whatever we were, we're not anymore, and it fucking feels like we broke up, so that's—yeah."

Sirius's eyes narrowed. "You and…who?"

James gulped and ran a hand through his hair. He'd been hoping (naively, he knew) to somehow avoid this part where he told his best friend he'd been keeping a secret from him for a month. But if there was anyone who would be there forever, who would forgive him anything, it was Sirius, and now that the words weighing him down had been flung out between them, he knew he needed to come clean so that his best friend could help him.

"Lily," he choked, and Sirius's face widened in shock. "We've been…hooking up. Since we got back to school."

Sirius ran a hand down his face, tracing his slack mouth, as he stared at James, who just waited, knowing from the intensity of Sirius's eyes that his friend was thinking fast, processing what James had said and reordering it to catch up, before he asked the bomb of a question that James had expected him to arrive at: "So…why did you…end things?"

Emotion he'd spent the night smothering in anger threatened to break through, and he pinched his nose under his glasses, taking a deep breath through his nose, before he answered, "I asked her out. For Hogsmeade this weekend. She said no."

His voice cracked on that last word—no—and uncomfortable heat pricked his eyes, constricted his throat, as the ghost of that word in her voice echoed in his mind. Sirius remained silent, watching him with a keen gaze, and James rambled to fill the silence. "I just thought—we were hanging out a lot, and working well together, and hooking up was…really fucking hot, and I—I thought she feeling how I was feeling, so—"

"And how were you feeling?" Sirius interjected.

James swallowed, the words he knew he needed to say thick in his dry mouth. "Like…she was my girlfriend. Or at least, I—I wanted her to be."

Distantly, a bell rang, signaling the start of the class they were now late for, and James swore under his breath. But to his surprise, Sirius just put a hand on his shoulder, giving him a firm squeeze before pushing him toward the door. "I'm sorry, mate," he said quietly. "Forget her, okay?"

His heart twisted painfully, like it was protesting against the very thought, but James knew his friend was right. Rejecting him once, fifth year, when he'd been an over-confident idiot, was one thing, but rejecting him a second time, seventh year, when they'd been making each other orgasm for a month? He needed to face facts: Lily Evans might like making out with him and might like what his fingers did inside her knickers, but she didn't want to be with him, didn't want to go on a date or hold his hand in public or do any of the other couple-y things couples in that school did.

Hurt balled in his chest, but he pushed it down, sought that other feeling, that more familiar feeling, that he could latch onto: anger. And as he stoked it, he let Sirius's words, Sirius's don't-give-a-fuck energy, bleed into him until the words became a mantra in his mind. Forget her, forget her, forget her.

"Lily?" Mary prompted again. "What happened?"

Her eyes blurred with tears. "You know I was having a shit day yesterday?"

"Yeah," Mary soothed.

Snape had played a cruel trick on her in Potions, swapping out an herb with another that looked near-identical, and in her distraction over working near her friends (and James) she hadn't noticed. No one around them knew what had caused the cauldron to explode, because she'd prepped the correct ingredient and had been sure nothing wrong had been put in her potion, but after she'd stayed back with Slughorn to chat and help clean the mess, Snape had been waiting for her in the corridor. Lily had tried to shrug him off, having grown tired of repeatedly denouncing his friends' blatant blood prejudice, but Snape had caught her ear with his insinuation about her exploding potion not being an accident, and once she'd given him the chance to speak, he'd basked in her attention, to the point where he blubbered about missing her friendship that summer and delivered an unexpected ultimatum: be his friend again, or he wouldn't stand in the way of his Slytherin peers, who were apparently plotting all sorts of genuine trouble for the upcoming school year.

"He told me he was protecting me," Lily had hissed to Mary incredulously at lunch after she'd finally escaped him. "And then he asked if I wanted to meet up in Hogsmeade! To 'catch up'!"

Her friend had encouraged her to forget him, but such a feat was hard to do when they shared all the same classes and she had sensed his beady eyes on her the rest of the afternoon. But then, when she'd thought dinner would bring a respite, someone (she swore it had been Sirius, just from the look on his face, but he denied all charges) had charmed the cutlery in the Great Hall to repel food, resulting in what looked like a monstrous food fight. Flitwick had put a stop to it, but not before the damage was done, and Lily had spent her dinner hour helping the teachers clean up younger students who didn't know the right spells, and also cleaning up the Great Hall from the splattered mess. James had ostensibly helped too, yet every time Lily had caught a glance at him, he'd either had food in his mouth or had been laughing with someone about something. It had been infuriating.

And then, as if the night simply couldn't resist topping the level of horrible that had already been the day, she'd had to do rounds with Sylvester Crumbleton, a seventh-year Hufflepuff who was the most pretentious, most annoying know-it-all on the planet. She'd spent the evening nodding, smiling, and internally tallying what traits could have possibly made him a Hufflepuff over a Ravenclaw, because the rest of the Hufflepuffs really were alright, but before she could land on a final deduction on that, he'd asked her out.

"I-I'm flattered," she'd squeaked once she'd found her voice again, "really, but I, um. I don't think—I think we're better as friends, Syl."

But he'd suggested, "Then we could go as friends? Keep this conversation going?"

This one-sided, boring conversation she blatantly had no interest in? Was he out of his damn mind? "Er—I can't, I'm sorry."

He'd looked at her curiously at that. "Oh, are you going with someone else?"

"No," she'd answered automatically, internally wincing as she tried to course-correct. "Well, I mean, with my girlfriends, obviously. Not another guy, if that's what you were getting at. A little hard to find time to date at the minute, what with N.E.W.T.s and all my Head Girl responsibilities…"

She had well and truly rambled, the words coming from awkwardness at the situation more than anything else, but they had been honest; her time for her friends was sparse enough as it is—she hardly had time to just leisurely hang out with someone, and if she did have a spot of free time, the last person she'd spend it on was Sylvester Crumbleton.

She'd spend it on hooking up with James.

The realization had hit her like a freight train, twisting and gnawing at her as she'd said a distracted goodbye to Sylvester and headed back toward Gryffindor Tower. When had that happened, that crossover from co-Heads who sneak in a quick, lusty make-out to being willing to sacrifice precious free time with her wider social group to be alone with him? She didn't know, couldn't pinpoint it, but it had rattled her. She'd thought it was only physical, what her and James were doing. A mutual relief of stress and sexual tension that was natural when one had to work closely with another person who was easy to be around and incredibly attractive.

It wasn't like they were going to date. They didn't have time, for one. And he was an arrogant toe-rag, for another. Always had been, always would be. It was just the way of the world. Hadn't he just proved it that very day, joking around during the mess that was dinner and letting her do all the work?

And then, as the icing on the day's horrible cake, he of her thoughts had appeared out of nowhere, tugging at his hair nervously as he opened with, "Hey, Evans—can I talk to you?"

"What now?" she'd asked with a sigh, assuming his demeanor was a preface to more bad news of more student drama they were being hailed to handle.

But he'd stopped in his tracks, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and asked, "Er—is now a good time?"

She'd scolded herself for seeming rude, rearranged her face. "Yeah, sorry. Long patrol with Crumble"—James winced appreciatively, which had coaxed a genuine smile from her face—"what's up?"

He'd looked at her a moment, almost like he was studying her, and then he'd taken a deep breath and said words she hadn't seen coming: "Would you want to go out with me this weekend?"

Absurdly, humiliatingly, her fingers had flown to pinch the bridge of her nose and the first rambling thing that fell out of her mouth was, "Why is everyone asking me that today?"

She hadn't even fully realized she'd said it out loud until James had answered her, voice clipped. "Probably because you're beautiful. And really fucking smart. And just…an all-around great person, Evans."

Lily had never felt smaller.

"And…look, I don't know who else has asked, but I know I'm asking because we've spent the past month hooking up and I really fucking like you."

Her eyes had fluttered closed, head whirling at that declaration, after everything she'd just thought of, convinced herself of. It was too much—her brain was fried, her emotions drained, her body aching with hunger so hard she felt sick. "I'm sorry, I just—I can't do this right now—"

He'd chuckled once, low and humorless. "It's just a yes or no question, Lily."

Hearing him say her first name like that—soft, quiet, already sad—cracked her heart. It was like he knew what her answer would be, and was just waiting for her to say it.

So she did. "I'm sorry, James. We shouldn't—I don't know if—I can't—"

"You can just say no," he'd interrupted. "You don't have to make up a reason."

She'd swallowed thickly, then said them, the words she couldn't take back: "Okay. Then I'm gonna say no. I just—"

"Can't right now," he'd finished for her, voice flat, face unreadable.

"Yeah," she'd whispered. "It's not that I don't like you, I do, I just—"

"Don't," he'd interrupted again, his temper finally simmering over the edge. "Stop trying to make this more complicated than it is—"

"I'm not," she'd protested, her temper flaring to meet his. "If you'd lis—"

"No, I'm done."

Air, organs, coherence—all left her body in one fell swoop. "Done," she'd repeated dumbly. He wasn't even going to let her explain?

He'd taken a step backwards—"Yeah, done"—his voice, once warm and plentiful, was now icy and sparse—"If you don't want"—he paused, gulped, took another backwards step—"then this is done. I'm done."

Her mouth had frozen, her heart cracking the rest of the way, but before she could say anything else, he'd disappeared around a corner.

She'd walked in a shocked stupor back to her room, and it wasn't until she'd crawled in bed and been overcome with a clawing, physical ache in her chest that the reality of her mistake caught up with her.

"Oh, Lil." The pity in Mary's voice was almost more than she could bear. "Do you want to go with him?"

"I—" She sniffed. "Is it horrible to say I don't know?"

Mary paused, then said carefully, "Well…it is…confusing."

Lily sighed, pulling away from her friend to hug her knees and thrust a hand deep into her hair. "He took me off guard!"

"By…asking you out after you've been hooking up with him?"

"YES!" Lily bellowed, frustration at her inability to articulate her feelings crashing like a tidal wave and leaving her teary all over again. "Because it—it's fucking James!"

As it turned out, that was really all she had to say for Mary to squeeze her shoulder and murmur, "I know."

It was a testament to their friendship and Mary's first-hand account from witnessing all she had over the years that Lily knew she meant it. Some things just didn't make sense, and the dynamic between Lily Evans and James Potter—with all its history, missteps, arguments, tension, and idiocy (more his side than hers, obviously)—was one of them.

Lily wasn't in class either. James wondered about this for a fleeting second before McGonagall scowled at him and Sirius, her look of displeasure lingering on him longer, and took five points each for their tardiness.

His sour mood festered—he never did like losing points, no matter what people said about him being a troublemaker—but he found he was oddly comfortable there. Sour. Angry. Because the more he was angry, the less he would feel the sting of rejection, the crunch of heartbreak. He had a team to lead into its first match in two weeks, a student body to manage, and friends to support: Sirius was being hounded in the corridors by fault of Regulus, Remus had a full moon the next week, and Peter was struggling harder than ever in his classes.

He couldn't afford to collapse in a heap of self-pity and sadness; he didn't have time.

So he had to move on.

James wasn't proud of it, but he had a spiteful streak. In Quidditch, it came in handy, as his hatred for losing drove him to push past all sorts of limits to win. But in real life…well. He knew it could land him in trouble (had landed him in trouble on several occasions when dealing with the Slytherins), but he still had this insatiable urge to get even. He'd tempered it somewhat—he saved his hexes for truly egregious offenses these days. And besides, just because he was spiteful didn't mean he wasn't fair. An eye for eye was how the Muggle saying went, wasn't it? Well, if Lily had suitors asking her out left and right—enough to make her not want to go out with him, enough to make him wonder if he'd imagined everything he'd thought she'd felt during their stolen moments together—he could find someone else too.

After class, he caught up with her in the library during his free period, sidling up to the desk where she sat working and sliding his hands casually in his pockets.

"Hey," he started quietly.

She started, blotting her ink, and jerked her eyes up at him before she visibly relaxed. "Holy shit, Potter," she whispered, starting to giggle. "You sure know how to scare a girl."

He chuckled softly. "Sorry about that."

She waved off his apology but looked at him with expectant eyes.

Right. "So, um…" He held her gaze, ignoring the roiling protest happening in his chest. "What are the odds you're free for Saturday?"

An eyebrow arched, eyes appraising him. "For the right guy, I'd say pretty good."

He gave her his best James Potter smile. "And how about for me?"

She couldn't hold back her own smile, though she tried to stay coy. "Yeah, alright."

James nodded, biting his lip just a smidge. "Meet in the Entrance Hall? Say, eleven?"

Her eyes pulled away from his mouth, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. "It's a date."

By lunch, the entire school was talking about how he was taking Adelaide Selwyn to Hogsmeade that weekend. Though he hadn't allowed himself to look at her, he'd heard Lily's voice float down the table in a spot of quiet, and he could pinpoint the exact moment she found out by the clatter of her goblet knocking over and sending pumpkin juice seeping over the table. She vanished the mess with a wave of her wand and took off in a huff, plate untouched, but instead of feeling like he'd won, James just felt nauseous.